


If Left Untreated

by DarkIsRising



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Angry Anakin Skywalker, Caretaker Obi-Wan Kenobi, Coma, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Whump
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-01
Updated: 2021-03-01
Packaged: 2021-03-13 04:20:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29770578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarkIsRising/pseuds/DarkIsRising
Summary: “I didn’t know who else to comm,” Anakin says, and Obi-Wan’s breath turns leaden in his lungs. “He’s hurt and I—” he turns his face to compose himself.Eight years have passed since the Battle of Naboo but all at once Obi-Wan is back in front of that bacta tank as his master floated in blue liquid, too still for someone battling for their life. He knows these fears won’t help Qui-Gon, whatever it is that’s happened, so he throws them for the Force to sort out and hopes it’ll steady his hands as he prepares his ship for takeoff. “How bad is it?”
Relationships: Qui-Gon Jinn/Obi-Wan Kenobi
Comments: 14
Kudos: 42





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you SO MUCH to the tireless work that Lilibet and antheiasilva have done to try to keep me in line.

A volley of blaster fire skirts dangerously close to Obi-Wan’s head and he ducks behind a downed speeder bike to answer his blinking comm.

“Kenobi,” he shouts into the unit as a steel canister explodes by his ankle. He pulls his legs in closer. This isn’t the best place for a conversation, but it’s the first opening he’s had. Someone had begun signaling Obi-Wan right as the smugglers he’s been tracking had taken a very sudden—very violent—dislike to the discovery there was a Jedi in their den. 

“Hey,” says a deep voice that’s finally settled on the other side of puberty. Even through the drone of his lightsaber that he activates with his free hand, Obi-Wan recognizes it. “Are you busy?”

“Nothing I can't handle,” Obi-Wan says cheerfully, and a flick of his wrist sends the smugglers’ blaster fire back in their direction. “What can I do for you, Anakin?”

“It’s about Qui-Gon. He—”

That’s as far as he gets before the comm signal cuts out, but that’s all Obi-Wan needs.

He’s been letting the smugglers play with him—drawing them out so that he could circle back and pick up the medicine they’d stolen from the Kafynian people. Now he is rearranging the pieces of strategy in his head, laying out a new course of action. He tucks his comm and lightsaber away, checking twice that they’re secured. With a leap, Obi-Wan climbs up the nearby scaffolding before taking off down a hall. 

The sooner this is done the sooner he can get back to his ship and restore Anakin’s lost connection. It isn’t rational to assume the worst when it comes to Qui-Gon’s well-being, and yet this isn’t the first time his heart has leapt into his throat at the barest mention of Qui-Gon’s name, and it’s only gotten worse since their encounter with a Sith had nearly taken Qui-Gon from him entirely. 

The smugglers are dealt with. The people of Kafyn-773 are jubilant and insist on a ceremony of gratitude where he is festooned with flowers. To refuse is apparently the gravest misstep a diplomat can take, so with gritted teeth and a small, professional smile Obi-Wan stands on a dais as they slip a string of bright yellow flowers over his head. Streaks of pollen stain his robes where the flowers settle around his chest while pink petals flutter down from a marble balcony above. 

During the speeches Obi-Wan’s mind scrolls through possibility, ticking through every scenario that could have led to Anakin on his comm unit, but he is at a loss. Last time he’d spoken to Qui-Gon, he and his padawan had been planning a longer stay at the Temple. Anakin’s ability to retain new languages was truly abysmal and, according to Qui-Gon, it was starting to cause intergalactic problems.

“If he tells one more ambassador to send their youngest daughter to my room instead of thanking them for tea, I may never be sent to Glongaan again,” Qui-Gon had said, his holo figure shaking a rueful head while Obi-Wan pressed a hand to his mouth, smothering back a laugh. At the time Obi-Wan had been grateful for the company while he hurtled toward his next mission, but now he wonders if that conversation about ambassadors’ daughters will be the last one he ever has with Qui-Gon. 

_Focus on the here and now,_ he scolds himself. Obi-Wan knows that this ceremony is as much a part of his mission as the earlier running and heroics. Still, it takes a monumental effort not to demand they hurry up as the skirt dancers and torch bearers take their positions for the first of four presentations.

When he is finally back to his ship Obi-Wan calls Anakin up on his console, picking delicate pink petals out of his hair and beard while he waits. With a flicker of blue Anakin appears and Obi-Wan scrutinizes the wavering form for any sign of injury, wondering if they’d been sent out on a mission after all.

“I didn’t know who else to comm,” Anakin says, and Obi-Wan’s breath turns leaden in his lungs. “He’s hurt and I—” he turns his face to compose himself. 

Eight years have passed since the Battle of Naboo but all at once Obi-Wan is back in front of that bacta tank as his master floated in blue liquid, too still for someone battling for their life. He knows these fears won’t help Qui-Gon, whatever it is that’s happened, so he throws them for the Force to sort out and hopes it’ll steady his hands as he prepares his ship for takeoff. “How bad is it?”

“He got a paper cut.”

Obi-Wan’s hands are frozen on the controls as he runs Anakin’s words through his mind a second time. It doesn’t bring Obi-Wan any closer to clarity. Anakin is rattled, though, Obi-Wan doesn’t need the Force to sense that, so he turns away from the ship’s controls to give Anakin his full attention.

“Is it… deep?” he asks, grasping for something to make this make sense.

“It’s a paper cut, Obi-Wan.” The padawan’s voice is as scathing as any seventeen-year-old's, but it's breathtakingly inappropriate when it's coming from a Jedi. “It’s not shrapnel.”

Now Obi-Wan is the one turning away to compose himself. Not a day goes by that Obi-Wan doesn’t thank the Force that he isn’t the one in charge of steering Padawan Anakin Skywalker toward the pathways of enlightenment and peace. The sweet, earnest boy they’d found on Tatooine has turned cantankerous as the years have passed. If Qui-Gon hadn't recovered and it had come down to Obi-Wan to train him, it very well might have been the death of he and Anakin both. 

“Anakin.” His voice is sharper than Obi-Wan means it to be, but it’s what happens whenever he tries to talk to Qui-Gon’s apprentice these days. “I’m sorry but I'm not seeing the problem here. Slap a bacta bandage on him and call it a day.”

“Qui-Gon won’t let me. He doesn’t think it’s bad enough to warrant that. So I tried to heal it with the Force when he was sleeping—” 

“You _what_?” 

“—but he woke up before I could do it. And then he gave me a lecture on consent and now he says I'm to work a week in the creche with the younglings for punishment.”

“I should say so.” It was disquieting to think of anyone, let alone one’s own padawan, manipulating their person in their sleep. Anakin’s ability to separate right from wrong is a constant struggle and one that continues to baffle Obi-Wan whenever Qui-Gon regales him with their latest exploits through the stars.

“Obi-Wan,” Anakin says and he isn’t bristling. He isn’t scathing. Instead, he sounds very small and achingly lonely. “I have a bad feeling about this.”

“I’ll be there soon.” Obi-Wan might not know what has Anakin so spooked, but if the boy trusts Obi-Wan enough to turn to him for help, then he’ll do what he can to honor that trust. “If it's not better by then we can start worrying."

*

He knows something is terribly wrong when he sees a familiar Mon Calamari waiting for him at the Temple entrance, her orange face carefully composed and her long, webbed hands clasped in front of her body.

"Obi-Wan," Bant Eerin says and that's all. Just his name, and that tone from his oldest Temple friend is enough to send him running. He doesn't care that masters are pulling their padawans out of his way or that the flocks of initiates are staring. He can feel his cloak flapping behind him as he races down wide, brightly lit hallways and through columned corridors to the Halls of Healing. 

By the time he’s there Obi-Wan is expecting the worst, and somehow even then he isn't prepared for what he sees. 

Qui-Gon is in a bed so starkly, so _medically_ white, that it gives Obi-Wan pause in the doorway. He’d imagined his former master would be suspended in bacta but instead he lays so motionless he could almost be on a funeral pyre. He’s hooked up to wires that spit out more data and vitals and output than Obi-Wan could ever hope to understand, and not even the soft fall of his long, unbound hair can make this scene any less cold. Any less mechanical.

This is nothing like the robust man that Obi-Wan had laughed with on the holocomm. Here Qui-Gon is so dwarfed by the medical equipment that he looks small, frail, and painfully mortal. 

Anakin stands from his chair where he's been holding vigil by Qui-Gon’s side. This is familiar, but Obi-Wan takes no comfort in that familiarity. After Naboo, Anakin had refused to leave Qui-Gon, not even to eat. Every time Obi-Wan had come back from reporting to the Council, or from the mess to bring back food for the both of them, he would find Anakin with his knees tucked in, leaning against the bacta tank—a tiny, sandy-haired sentry. 

Time has lengthened Anakin and now Obi-Wan has to tilt his head up to see his face. Anakin’s eyes are bloodshot with sleeplessness and there are tears that glint in them, glistening like knives.

He greets Obi-Wan with a formal bow. It is a deference that he has never once shown Obi-Wan without Qui-Gon’s prompting in all the years they’ve known each other, a social nicety that Anakin wields as cuttingly as a weapon and Obi-Wan is gutted by the display.

“Knight Kenobi,” Anakin says—a distant, frigid fury hangs off the edges of his clipped voice like icicles in a storm. “Do I have your permission to start worrying now?"

*

“We’ve been able to narrow it down to a spore that entered the bloodstream sometime in the last fortnight,” the Chief Healer tells Obi-Wan as Anakin throws himself back into his chair with a scowl.

“Oh, so you’re talking to him but not me, huh?” he asks and the healer’s eyes go big as he startles at the interruption. His training in the healing arts—here among fellow Jedi—had probably never prepared him for someone as badgeringly rude as Anakin.

Obi-Wan cuts Anakin a quelling glance, but gets only an eye roll in return.

“A spore?” Obi-Wan gently prods the healer who blinks as he collects himself. 

“A spore, yes, Most likely something picked up from a planet in the Sluis sector—”

“Yes, yes, we just got back from Glongaan. You know that, I know that, Obi-Wan knows that. How about you tell us something we don’t know?”

“Anakin.” Obi-Wan says, low enough to serve as a warning but it only adds kindle to Anakin’s crackling flame.

“What? Some healer he is, if he can’t even tell us anything important. Like, is Qui-Gon going to die? Can you tell us that at least?”

“Anakin—”

“I just want answers, Obi-Wan,” and in his mouth Obi-Wan’s name is said with all the bite of an obscenity.

“If you can give us one moment alone, please,” Obi-Wan says to the healer who doesn’t need to be told twice. He bows and scurries off like a spiny bograt as a vine snake approaches. Obi-Wan takes a centering breath before he turns to the teenager who has sullenly pulled his knees to his chest. “Anakin, the healers aren’t your enemies.” 

“They aren’t my friends either,” Anakin spits back and for a moment Obi-Wan is shocked anew by his fury. 

This must be the thing that Master Yoda had seen when Anakin was a boy, lurking behind bright blue eyes and sun-kissed hair. Qui-Gon had spoken to Obi-Wan about these bouts of anger, a confidence that they shared only when Anakin was too far away to overhear. Obi-Wan knew about these moods, had heard Qui-Gon tell of their mercurial nature and their frequency, but Obi-Wan had never fully grasped the vastness of it before. Here he stands, as close as he dares to come to a star, and even at this distance Obi-Wan can feel the ultraviolet radiation as it chars his flesh.

“What would you have them do, Anakin?”

“Like you care.” Anakin’s voice is so flayed that Obi-Wan can feel his own throat tighten at the sound. “No one ever consults me. He’s my master. _My_ master and everyone treats me like I’m a nuisance. Like I’m underfoot. But then you come in and the Chief Healer falls all over himself to talk to _you,_ when _you_ didn’t even believe me when I told you something was wrong.” All at once the glowing heat burns away, turning to a bitter ash that falls from Anakin’s mouth. “I’m the one that knew something was wrong. The _only_ one that knew. And now everyone acts so scared of me they won’t even talk to me, like I’m somehow to blame for all this.”

“No one is blaming you, Anakin,” Obi-Wan says, stepping closer. He wants to put a hand on Anakin’s shoulder—as if that could fix the damage this aching loneliness has wrought—but he isn’t sure the ember of his ire has smoldered away quite yet.

“Qui-Gon is the only person that isn’t afraid of me and now he’s—” Whatever he was going to say is banished with a shake of his head, and the beads in his padawan braid clack against the back of his chair.

Anakin props his chin on his knees and all Obi-Wan can see is that little boy, blond and small, bathed in the blue light of a bacta tank. 

“I’m sorry they value my presence over yours. I can only imagine how frustrating that has been.” Obi-Wan reaches out and places a hand on Anakin’s shoulder, relieved to find not the searing heat of a star but instead the gentle warmth of a human. Wary eyes meet his, and Obi-Wan squeezes Anakin’s shoulder before withdrawing to tuck his hands inside his sleeves. “I'll ask you again: what would you have them do?”

There is a change in Anakin, and all at once he slumps into himself. He is exhausted, stitched together by anger that has unraveled and left him to shrink away.

“You’re right,” Obi-Wan continues. “You were the only one that knew Qui-Gon was in danger. I’m sorry I didn’t listen to what you were trying to tell me before, but I’m listening now. What can I do? I’m here now. What can I do to help?”

“I think he should be somewhere more comfortable than this,” Anakin says at last, voice little more than a hush. “I think he should be in our rooms.”

“The healers are monitoring him,” Obi-Wan says, tilting his head to the machines that haven’t stopped whirring out calculations that blink across mounted screens since he’d stepped in the room.

“They seem portable enough.”

“You can't take care of him by yourself.” _You’re just a boy,_ Obi-Wan wants to say but stops himself. There’s no point in undoing all the progress they’ve just made, regardless of how true it is. 

“I can do it. I want to.”

“Wanting to and having the ability to are very different things, Anakin.” 

Obi-Wan can see the idea flicker across Anakin’s face. Before he can so much as give voice to it Obi-Wan is shaking his head. Anakin’s next words are obvious and he raises his hand to forestall them, but Anakin pushes on. 

“Then you do it.”

“Oh, no.” Obi-Wan steps back, away from Anakin and the madness that is his request. “I’m no healer.”

“Please.” Anakin says, and Obi-Wan knows how much that one, sincere, pleading words must have cost him. “Having him here again, not knowing if he’ll wake up or not. I can’t do this. It’s too much like it was after Naboo.”

Obi-Wan forces himself to look at Qui-Gon, to see him, to _really_ see him. His chest is exposed and Obi-Wan can see the scar tissue right below his heart where a Sith had nearly claimed his life, and there is a place in Obi-Wan’s chest that carries its twin. It isn’t visible, of course, and in his darker moods he knows it is little more than a fantasy. Still, looking at his former master now, he can feel the haunted edges of where it pulls. The memory of nearly losing Qui-Gon is a horror he won’t ever shake.

He’d never known it before but he can see now that Anakin carries a phantom scar in the same spot. He's just as damaged—just as changed—by what they had both almost lost at the piercing end of a red lightsaber.

“Alright.”

“Really?” Anakin sits up, his voice brimming with a new hope.

“Yes. Fine, yes.”

It’s a terrible idea, of course, but at least it’ll give Obi-Wan the chance to watch over Anakin while he monitors Qui-Gon. Because as little as he knows about the healing arts, Obi-Wan knows enough about leaping into danger to see that Anakin Skywalker without a guardrail to keep him from careening over the abyss is a catastrophe waiting to happen.


	2. Chapter 2

He hadn’t lied to Anakin when he’d said he wasn’t a healer. Obi-Wan listens, trying to program into his memory everything Bant is telling him, but he still feels woefully unprepared for it when she starts to walk out the door.

“Relax, Obi-Wan. I have the utmost faith in you,” Bant says, touching his shoulder with easy affection. “All you need to do is get through the night. I’ll be back in the morning to check his vitals and replace his nutrition feed. If anything starts to beep ominously the healer on duty will be called. If they don’t come, you can always try my private comm. I’ll leave it by my bed just in case.”

He watches the door slide closed and then that’s it. He’s here, alone with Qui-Gon and a dozen monitors that he eyes with suspicion.

Anakin is little more than a shadow when he steps into the room, but Obi-Wan can sense him nevertheless.

“I’m surprised you turned down the offer of a medical droid,” he says to the stillness in the shape of a padawan that settles against the wall. “You love droids.”

No answer is forthcoming and when Obi-Wan turns he can see Anakin with tears standing in his eyes, his face stretched taut with the effort of holding back emotion.

“Oh, Ani,” he says, the old endearment slipping out before he can think better of it. Anakin’s head snaps back as if he’s been slapped.

“Don’t,” Anakin says, voice low, and though Obi-Wan takes a step toward him to offer comfort, the padawan stomps back into his room, shutting the door between them.

He doesn’t see Anakin again that night, but Obi-Wan can feel him. There is a steady ebb and flow of energy that comes from the room next door, a wave crash of anger that recedes into serenity before bearing down once more. Obi-Wan’s shoulders rise up, a physical instinct to weather a metaphysical storm, and now it’s beginning to make sense why the rooms in this hall have mostly been abandoned by the other masters. If this much raw feeling is finding places to leak through his own protective shielding he can only imagine how battered around the other padawans had been without the experience to guard against such an intrusion.

Obi-Wan can’t sleep, not with this unrelenting emotion sinking in the air, so he abandons his cot to wander the room. He tries to putter around the eating table, to stare out the window, to rearrange his toiletries in the ‘fresher, but all roads lead back to Qui-Gon.

He checks monitors that Bant had patiently tried to teach him to read. Much of it is beyond his ability to follow, which only goes to prove how differently their education had branched after becoming padawans. She reads the bodies of the sentient like he reads peace treaties: an easy skim that has seen enough to compare it to to know whats going right and what’s going to need a fight. Without her beside him Obi-Wan stutters his way through it all. Metabolic activity, brain function, all of the things that gave proof that Qui-Gon is alive despite this unrelenting stillness. He traces a finger on the screen that shows the mountain chain of Qui-Gon’s heartbeat and takes comfort in watching it crest and fall and crest again.

Even with all the assurances of the technology, it’s hard for Obi-Wan to see himself whether Qui-Gon is breathing. His chest barely moves and Obi-Wan has the most inexplicable urge to chart every exhale himself by bringing his cheek close enough to feel the brush if it.

Qui-Gon’s hair is caught in his beard and Obi-Wan reaches to smooth the long strands of it away from his lips. They are dry from disuse and Obi-Wan can only stare.

It happened once—so long ago that Obi-Wan almost doesn’t believe it happened at all.

He’d just turned nineteen and the dust from their newest off-world calamity had only begun to settle. Obi-Wan was running high on a potent cocktail that was equal parts relief and adrenaline for having found Qui-Gon alive, mixed with dashes of youthful overconfidence and hormones. He’d found Qui-Gon’s mouth with his and for the briefest, heart-stopping moment he could have sworn his master had responded to his kiss. But then Obi-Wan’s shoulders were taken in a firm grip that pulled him away as Qui-Gon’s temperate blue eyes had found his.

“Padawan,” he’d said, a warning, voice firm and final.

They never spoke about it again.

It’s been years since Obi-Wan even thought of that kiss. He'd ached in the days following the rejection, though he’d tried to keep those feelings as tightly packed away from his master as he could.

Obi-Wan had carried on as if nothing had changed, and after a while the fiction became fact.

Still, looking at Qui-Gon now, there’s a rekindling of something long-ago-buried. An ache that flickers in his chest, reminding him that there may very well be a reason he’d agreed to watch over Qui-Gon while every instinct in him had said to leave his care to the far more capable hands of the Temple healers. 

The air in the room changes, then. It thrums, like a wire being plucked. This is different, somehow, from the roiling emotions of a moment ago. It carries the distinct taste of danger and Obi-Wan’s body braces at the feel of it—shoulders squaring, focus sharpening—as his hand wanders down to touch his hip where his lightsaber would be if it weren’t so late at night.

The monitors sway a little and Obi-Wan can hear glass tinkling with the barest of tremors as anger becomes manifest. Obi-Wan watches a crack appear on a data screen and somewhere in the room a cup rattles to the ground, a crash as glass shards flee apart on impact.

Anakin.

The door between them blinks red, a warning that Anakin has locked it from his side. He vaguely recalls that there is some sort of override code, though Obi-Wan doesn’t know what the number chain could be. Qui-Gon had certainly never needed to use it with him, since Obi-Wan can’t think of a single time that he bothered to lock Qui-Gon out. Even at his most vulnerable, in the moments he was at his lowest, he’d always taken comfort knowing that he could reach out through their bond and Qui-Gon would appear in his doorway.

He can’t be sure if the locked door is something that is a habit of Anakin’s or only an honor he is bestowing on Obi-Wan, but he’ll respect his privacy for now. As long as the rattling tremors don’t get any worse.

*

Obi-Wan waits until Bant arrives to knock on Anakin’s door. 

He had felt Anakin drop off to sleep at some point before the purple of dawn lifted the night sky. The room had finally stopped trembling and Obi-Wan used his sleeplessness to formulate a plan. Anakin was sorely in need of guidance, and though Obi-Wan had run into battle with more enthusiasm than he currently felt at the prospect of playing master to Anakin’s padawan, he was just going to have to provide for him until Qui-Gon awoke.

“Ah, Anakin,” Obi-Wan says, pitching his voice to be bright even though he feels about as tired and rumpled as Anakin looks. “You’re awake. Excellent. Why don’t you get dressed and we can go for a run?”

Blue eyes, glazed over with exhaustion, narrow at him.

“Qui-Gon always starts the morning with a meditation,” Anakin says, as if Obi-Wan wasn’t once his apprentice too.

“Yes, I know,” Obi-Wan says, careful to enunciate the words to mask his irritation, but he isn’t certain he’s fooling anyone. Obi-Wan had no interest in attempting a meditation with Anakin just yet, it would be too like trying to merge his consciousness with a bomb. “I thought we could try something new.”

Thankfully, Anakin takes his surly mutterings back into his room and changes without the fight that Obi-Wan was expecting. While Obi-Wan waits he watches Bant work, pulling up data and checking screens.

“Was there some kind of atmospheric event here last night?” she asks. “I’ve seen monitors left out in hail storms that were less knocked about than these.”

“There were some disturbances,” says diplomatically. Bant catches his meaning, sparing a glance to the doors Anakin had disappeared through. “Nothing that can’t be purged with some light calisthenics, I think.”

“Force willing that will do the trick. Any more ‘disturbances’ and I’ll need to requisition new equipment.”

“Grueling calisthenics, then.”

*

Obi-Wan follows the run with some conditioning exercises and then some sparring until Anakin’s face is covered in sweat and he’s panting for all he’s worth. Even then, when they settle down to meditate, Obi-Wan can feel the twisting darkness that laps at the edges of Anakin’s thoughts.

“Quiet your mind,” Obi-Wan chides and Anakin’s face becomes pinched with all the things he wants to say. To his credit, he doesn’t give voice to any of them.

Eventually Anakin finds some measure of something that Obi-Wan would have to be very generous to call peace. Still, it’s a start.

According to Anakin he still has a few days left on his punishment at the creche. While he’s off corrupting young minds, Obi-Wan spends his day on his datapad, catching up on written reports that he’s been neglecting to fill out. Healers drift in and out of the room at regular intervals. Obi-Wan lets them in and offers them tea, but they never stay long.

Despite all the poking and prodding, Qui-Gon doesn’t move. He doesn’t stir. He barely breathes. 

Each time they leave Obi-Wan settles back into the chair that he’s pulled up beside Qui-Gon’s bed. He should say something on the off chance that Qui-Gon can hear him, but no words ever come to mind.

When there’s nothing left to busy himself with, Obi-Wan sets his datapad aside. The sun has lowered and the late afternoon light comes through Qui-Gon’s window in a long, reaching rectangle. There’s a loneliness in that bright sun beam as it catches Qui-Gon in its sights and Obi-Wan can see motes of dust hovering in the air above where he lays.

The last healer to come through leaves a small pot of balm for Qui-Gon’s lips. It smells like something horribly earthy—like herbs and roots and all the folk remedies that Qui-Gon liked to cheerfully try on his more minor injuries while Obi-Wan warily watched. 

“Come, now, Padawan. Immerse yourself in a different culture,” he would say with a twitching smile.

“I’d rather immerse myself in bacta, Master, if it’s all the same to you. But I do hope you won’t regret your eventual sepsis.”

How ironic that Qui-Gon should be felled by a spore and none of the medical innovations that Obi-Wan had so vocally championed could do anything to help.

Obi-Wan uses his thumb to smooth the ointment over Qui-Gon’s bottom lip. For a moment he pauses as he feels the softest stir of breath on his finger. He wants to linger here—to feel that proof of life, as delicate as it is—but this isn’t a privilege that he’s been granted by Qui-Gon. Quite the opposite, really, so Obi-Wan forces himself to be practical about it. He swipes his thumb over Qui-Gon’s upper lip and heads to the ‘fresher to wash the rest of the balm off. 

While he’s there he can hear Anakin enter alone, murmuring: “Hold on, let me just…” as he scurries to his room and shuts the connecting door behind him. The walls are just thin enough that he can hear the rise and fall of a conversation but the words are lost among the chrome. An hour passes as Anakin speaks to someone through his comm, and by the time he finally emerges Obi-Wan is attempting to brush Qui-Gon’s long hair free from knots.

“He’d hate that, you know,” Anakin says after watching Obi-Wan from the doorway for long minutes. “He doesn’t like being helpless.”

Obi-Wan bites away the temptation to lecture Anakin on the nature of ‘hate.’ “Nevertheless,” Obi-Wan says instead, bending closer to try to suss out the source of a tangle that catches at his brush. “It needs to be done.”

“Hm,” Anakin says, crossing to the kitchen to pour himself a glass of water.

“Who were you talking to in there?” Obi-Wan asks. It’s an idle question but his head snaps up when Anakin slams his glass down on the counter with a solid thunk. 

“No one.”

With Anakin’s back turned Obi-Wan can’t be sure of his expression, but his shoulders are rising up to his ears and it’s as guilty a posture as Obi-Wan has ever seen.

“Anakin,” he says, drawing out the name in warning. “Who were you talking to?”

“Don’t worry about it, Obi-Wan.”

“Generally speaking I don’t find those words have ever worked as intended. It’s quite the opposite, really.” Obi-Wan sets down the brush on the nightstand and gives Anakin his full attention. “Who were you talking to?”

Without another word, or so much as a glance back, Anakin stomps back into his room, shutting and locking the door behind him. Suddenly it's somehow easier to speak to an unresponsive Qui-Gon. 

"I don't know how you deal with that boy," he tells his former master before settling in to brush his hair once more.


End file.
